passim in passing

This past weekend brought a really exciting outreach opportunity through a host of collaborating institutions down at LAARC (the London archaeological archive research centre. or something along those lines). The Thames Discovery Project hosted a one-day seminar on the archaeology of human remains from the Thames foreshore, in conjunction with just about everyone involved with bones in the whole of London: Museum of London provided materials and their expert personnel from both the commercial Museum of London Archaeology (MoLa) and the Centre for Human Bioarchaeology , English Heritage staff, stalwarts from Birkbeck and local digs, and of course myself, as a bit of a UCL / Birkbeck twofer. You can check out the TDP's take on the day here , but I can safely say it seemed like a pretty good day. Lots of participation, lots of hands-on experience for the attendees, and a ton of questions for the experts--at least no one seemed bored! We heard about bodies on the foreshore, t...

Well, here we go... This little narrative journey comes after  quite a bit of thinking about blogs, archaeology, and the professional repercussions (and benefits!) of diving headlong into new media.  The first question I had, of course is 'why'-- why throw yourself out there? What should you talk about?  And does anyone even listen?  Slowly, I've seen a couple different answers emerge. A lot of my time is spent flicking through other people's interweb offerings -- colleagues, friends, and even organizations are now all  multimedia presences in my life. I've been looking at the excellent Middle Savegery  for a while, as well as more targeted single-project blogs and websites like L-P Archaeology's Prescott Street dig site and the Thames Discovery site .  For me personally, the 'blog' format offers a chance for unfinished ideas to live a little,  and a chance for the little projects that crop up from time to get their time in the s...